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After more than a decade away from the game, I’ve picked up playing Magic: the Gathering once again. ¹

When I started playing around 1996, my nerdy-ass self had a great time collecting the cards and devising tactics. But my tiny allowance made it difficult to be competitive, and I grew frustrated after losing all the time to friends with bigger allowances and better cards. Moreover, I didn’t know about the non-constructed formats — ways of playing Magic where all players pull from a random distribution of cards — in which the game becomes more about luck, improvisation, and creativity, and less about the ability to buy into tried-and-true winning decks.

Also, I’m pretty sure that around that time I became deeply interested in girls and downright obsessed with doing things to impress them.

But anyway, now that I’m generally interested in impressing just the one girl, who is mostly amused and only a little embarrassed at my endless parade of geekouts, I’m back in the game and having a blast.

Some notes on my relapse:

M11 Pre-Release Tournament. The new core set, Magic 2011, came out mid-July, so the wife and I decided to play in a sealed deck prerelease tournament at Cards and Comics Central in San Francisco. We each opened up 6 packs of the new Magic 2011 set and built decks from there. I went in wanting to go blue/white, but ended up with solid creature removal cards in black and some worthwhile creatures in both black and white, so that’s ultimately what I decided to play. Some of my notable pulls:

• [card]Sun Titan[/card]
• [card]Phylactery Lich[/card]
• [card]Royal Assassin[/card]
• [card]Whispersilk Cloak[/card]

I lost my first round to an awesome, long-time player who later took some time to offer constructive criticism of my deck. I won the second and the third. And for the fourth, my partner and I took a draw and split the booster packs given out as prizes to those with enough wins.

The wife made a strong showing — especially for a player merely 3 weeks into the game! One of her opponents made the comment, “I hate noobs that know what they’re doing.” Her green/white deck brought on some massive trample damage for some solid game wins. An interesting (but not surprising) fact: she was the only female player in the 32-person tournament.

I had a great time and met a number of friendly players. But ultimately, I’d love to find a community where the competitive atmosphere is shade less insular and adversarial.

Duels of the Planeswalkers on XBox Live Arcade. Duels of the Planeswalkers is a solid Magic game available via the XBox Live Arcade for about $10. You start with two decks, and you have to win the remaining 6 decks by beating the computer-controlled Planeswalkers in “Campaign” mode. For each victory, you get a specific card to add to the deck you used to win that game. You can’t remove any cards from the core deck; you can only customize the bonus cards for any particular deck.

I’ve enjoyed it as an introduction (or reintroduction, in my case) to Magic because many of the decks feature essential cards that have been reprinted in one core set after another. It’s been fun to reacquaint myself with each mana color’s personality and flex my creaky instincts after all these years.

Podcasts. So far, each episode of the Deck Construct podcast seems to do a good job of (a) roving over a basic topic, polishing it in your mind enough to bring out a nice, novel realization; and (b) presenting a completely unfamiliar rule, format, or idea and explaining it quite well.

Software and Applications. MagicAssistant is an open-source card database and organizer. We’ve been using it to track our collection of cards and maintain decklists; I expect that sorting, filters, and searching will also be really useful for deckbuilding.

Well, that’s the brain dump. Every few nights we’ve been playing the “pack wars” or minimaster format, in both 1 vs. 1 and two-headed giant arrangements, so that’s probably coming up next!